The Piasa Bird by Kevin Candela

by Kevin Candela

It’s been said that Shakespeare essentially wrote every plot there is, but if so it’s hard finding where he covered the Legend of the Piasa Bird. An absolutely captivating story with a rousing and unforgettable climax, the native saga as known to locals in its simplest form goes as follows: A great winged beast, effectively a flying chimera of human, reptile and bird, terrorizes the Mississippi River in this area (Alton and Godfrey, Illinois, which are positioned on the northern side of that east-west “kink” the river makes just north of its junction with the Missouri River). The natives of this area are being picked off at random by the monster, which takes its victims off somewhere to presumably devour them. If it has a nest or lair of any kind, it’s apparently nowhere near where it does its hunting.

Smart monster.

So the terror-filled natives get together and devise an ingenious plan. The chief, being a leader back when it meant something, offered himself up for the giant beast by effectively challenging it to one-on-one combat in a small clearing atop the river-edging limestone bluffs. Meanwhile, the rest of the tribe hid behind the tree trunks edging the clearing, bows at the ready. When the monster spied the chief and came down to claim his easy prey it did so into a cloud of arrows. Mortally wounded, it managed to get away and—like a classic Toho giant monster—ended up plunging into the Mississippi and vanishing forever.

Or so the story goes.

Many in fact believe there was a huge creature in these parts back in that day, but that it may not have been a flying monster. That great tale of ingenious and daring heroism may just be some settler’s clever story, which gained popularity because of its fine plot and morality and eventually supplanted the truth.

What is that truth? Good question. The original story apparently involved not a flying terror but an aquatic one. In those days the local Mississippi itself was nearly unnavigable, clogged as its channel was by masses of dead trees that hung up on the river’s many shallow spots across its expanse. Perhaps something lived in amongst those bleached, twisted “islands,” something huge and dangerous—something to put the fear into the original locals and bring about what eventually became the Tale of the Piasa Bird.

What could it have been? The Mississippi is fresh—if extremely muddy—water. So’s the bottom of a lake like Loch Ness, interestingly. Another of Nessie’s kin, like Ogopogo? If so, we are left to wonder where it went, because it’s pretty much a given that this particular giant cryptid, whether aquatic or airborne, is what the Hansen Brothers from the movie Slapshot would call “dead history”. But the creature’s vanishing, if not in fact brought about by a brave chief and his tribe, might very well owe to the efforts that removed all that dead wood from the Mississippi. An excursion around the solar-powered Mississippi museum on Rte. 3 in Alton is not just free, it’s quite illuminating. One exhibit shows how all that driftwood, especially the huge pieces, was hauled up onto the decks of specially made “river cleaner” boats that had twin hulls side by side and a space between the cabins for huge trees to be chopped up into firewood. Plenty of other fascinating stuff there too.

Closing thought: IF the Bird was REALLY some kind of giant chimera, that’s pretty amazing. If it was akin to whatever Nessie is, well, that’s pretty incredible too. Only one thing seems for sure, at least if the stories told by the natives are to be believed.

Something unusual once lived here.